Category: politics

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life politics

Negotiate From A Position of Power

In 2020, a millionaire named Raj Bhakta purchased my alma mater and neighbor, Green Mountain College. He didn’t know what he’d do with the old girl when he purchased it (I had some ideas), but two years later, he has a better sense of things.

According to the development papers he recently submitted to our town, he now “seeks to turn the property into a regional destination for agrotourism, hospitality, small businesses, and post-graduate food and beverage education.” He imagines that “the campus will become the incubator for entrepreneurs developing new businesses who seek to locate in a dynamic and energetic work community.”

The estimated $100 million plan has three phases to be developed over the next decade:

  • Phase 1 (2023-2026) will convert existing college dorms into a 100-room destination hotel and twenty-three new condos, turn the college’s gym into a spa/fitness/wellness center, convert the main cafeteria into a convention center and the library into a “bulk storage tasting space,” and finally, construct a new “antique small craft distillery”
  • Phase 2 (2026-2028) will see the development of a brewery/tasting room, the addition of 40+ apartments, a sports complex, an equestrian center, and outdoor gardens
  • Phase 3 (2028-2030+) will include a post-graduate education center, a roastery, sports fields, improved trails, and a walking garden

The first part of the plan requires developing a significant number of new parking lots and some new road construction (to avoid traffic on the residential terrace beside the property). They hope to shield most of the parking behind three-foot-high brick walls (similar to the walls already on campus) with “dark-sky friendly” lighting. They hope to build enough parking for 549 vehicles (an increase of 412 from what the college had).

Finally, he would like to add a helipad to the circle in front of the college. Because the property anchors the west end of Main Street, the helipad would dominate the view on Main Street.

GMCTo attract investors to the project, Bhakta asked the town in March to stabilize his property taxes for the next ten years. He argued that he already pays more taxes than the college ever did (since the college was a non-profit educational institution), and he’s not asking for a tax waiver — just tax stabilization. He suggested in a presentation to the town that he would use “his current $100,000 tax bill as a base to which a surcharge equivalent to a quarter of a percent of the development’s gross revenues would be added.”

When he made the presentation, he added a veiled threat: a religious group had contacted him about purchasing the property, and if the town didn’t back his development plan, he might have to sell to them; as a religious institution, they’d be tax exempt, so stable taxes with him would be better than no taxes at all.

About a week after the presentation, the town voted to give the select board the power to explore a tax stabilization deal with Bhakta. Still, any agreement would be subject to the approval of the town’s voters.

The tax stabilization deal is perhaps the only leverage the town has over what happens at the former college. We learned the hard way that zoning, permitting, and democracy doesn’t work. Despite the zoning board and the town’s voters rejecting the construction of a Dollar General in town, the developer had deep enough pockets to fight it in court, and the town ran out of money to keep up our appeals. The Dollar General should open at the front gate of our town any month now.

Outside of the helipad (which I’m entirely opposed to from a noise pollution standpoint), I’m not opposed to Bhakta’s plan. It supports the goals of our official town plan, which seeks to “grow Poultney’s outdoor recreational economy, support existing businesses, and encourage new ones.” With a focus on agrotourism, the renovation of dorms into a 100-room hotel, and the conversion of other dorms into condos (I’m guessing for short-term rental purposes), it could bring the tourists every Vermont town needs to survive and thrive.

I have concerns about the destruction of the trees on campus and how the added parking lots will contribute to run-off pollution into the Poultney River. I hope regulations around Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law, may help balance those concerns.

With all of that, the tax stabilization deal does give the town some leverage over Bhakta’s plan. One of my neighbors suggested the select board could use that leverage to ensure Bhakta hires a certain percentage of contractors, construction workers, and service industry folks from the local pool (however that gets defined). The town could also require he set aside a certain percentage of the 40+ apartments built in Phase 2 for low-income Vermonters. I support both of those proposals and encourage the town’s residents to brainstorm even more.

Bhakta said in his presentation that the town’s support of his development is vital to his success. If that’s true, let’s ensure (in writing) that his development contributes to the town’s success as well.

Categories
politics

100 Seconds to Midnight

Are you nervous about a nuclear war yet?

I’m co-teaching a survey course this quarter on 20th Century American History for my high schoolers. We’re trying to cover one decade per week. We can only scratch the surface this quarter, but the students will choose one event for us to investigate deeper next quarter.

After surveying the Progressive Era, World War I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, we just finished summarizing World War II. We used this interactive timeline to guide our discussions.

Here’s what I want you to remember: 

  1. Spring 1936, Germany began its occupation of Austria and the Rhineland.
  2. Late 1938, Hitler (with British permission) annexed part of Czechoslovakia.
  3. September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, starting World War II in earnest.
  4. November 1939, US manufacturers began selling arms and supplies to Great Britain.
  5. December 1941, Japan attacked the US, after which Germany declared war on us, and we returned the favor.

These things don’t happen all at once. Five years passed between Germany’s first acts of international aggression and the United States’ declaration of war. 

In 2014, the Russian Federation annexed Crimea from Ukraine, setting off the still-ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. For the first eight years, the war was relatively underground. The Russian Federation claimed the Ukrainian people in the eastern regions were rising against the “neo-nazi” government in Kyiv, a puppet regime installed by Western elites.

But in February 2022, the Russian Federation openly invaded its neighbor after months of military buildup. Contrary to all expectations, the Ukrainian people put up an impressive defense and counteroffensive, and now the army of the Russian Federation seems in disarray.

As the right-centered Atlantic Council recently wrote:

More than six months since the onset of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion, it is now obvious that his army is in fact a deeply flawed institution that bears almost no resemblance to the immaculate fighting force of Red Square parades and Kremlin propaganda. Instead, the Russian military suffers from endemic corruption, low morale, and poor leadership, with individual initiative in short supply and commanders deeply reluctant to accept personal responsibility.

In response to these defeats, President Putin annexed four more regions in Ukraine. He  gave a speech earlier this week celebrating and defending the annexation, using the opportunity to denounce “the western elites” who have united against the Russian Federation’s efforts.

Meanwhile, Western elites heard in his words a defeated man willing to do anything to hold on to power. According to Foreign Policy, hardliners in Russia’s government have increased their pressure on President Putin to unleash hell on Ukraine. The pressure led to the federation’s attempted mobilization of 30,000 more troops.

With the Russian Federation now claiming sovereignty over the four eastern regions, we must view Ukraine’s attempt to recover them through President Putin’s latest speech, where he said, “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country…we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us [emphasis added]. This is not a bluff.”

In response, the United States (in the form of President Biden) warned that the Russian Federation would face a “consequential” response if they introduced chemical or nuclear weapons to the battlefield. 

President Biden did not elaborate, so neither the American public nor the Russian Federation knows what he meant by “consequential.”

I fear the threat may become the equivalent of President Obama’s “red line” in Syria. 

But I fear even more that the criticism of President Obama’s failure to act in Syria will persuade President Biden to go the extra step and respond to the Russian Federation’s use of nuclear weapons with nuclear missiles of our own.

No one knows.

No one knows.

Are you scared yet?

Categories
politics

The United States of Confederate America

From The United States of Confederate America:

[T]he South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast.

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politics reviews

Sincerely, Goodbye Mr. C.K.

My students have to write an essay this week on any controversial topic of their choosing. They have to state their opinion and support it using at least three different reasons, each supported in their own right. Topics include the reëlection of former President Trump, the right of trans women to participate in women’s sports, the status of digital art, involuntary mental-health therapy for teenagers, Disney’s financial donations to anti-gay politicians in Florida, and more.

One student elected to address “cancel culture,” though he has little understanding of the issue’s nuances. That’s where his research will come in, and I look forward to seeing his opinion develop.

When discussing examples of cancel culture with him this morning, he began by bringing up Bill Cosby. I explained to him that there’s a difference between “cancel culture” and being held accountable for one’s criminal acts. Instead, I suggested he consider the case of another world-famous comedian, Louis C.K.

In 2017, Louis C.K. published an open apology letter in The New York Times. He admitted to exposing himself to women who felt unable to reject his advances due to his influence in the entertainment industry. Though he claimed he never exposed himself to a woman without first asking her permission, he realized — now that their story was public — that the women did not feel safe enough to reject him.

He ended his letter by saying he would now “step back and take a long time to listen.”

After publishing the apology, Hollywood canceled its relationship with Louis C.K. His recently-completed movie did not get released. He lost deals with Netflix, HBO, and TBS. His animated characters received new voices (even in reruns). He later claimed the incident cost him $35 million.

About nine months later, Louis C.K. returned to the stage in New York City and began his comeback, which later blossomed into national and international tours.

Three years and one pandemic later, over 12,000 members of the Recording Academy voted to give Louis C.K. the award for “Best Comedy Album” at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

Whose culture, I wonder, is being canceled?

I have very little doubt that Louis C.K.’s award-winning album is funny. Before deciding I didn’t want to give him any more of my money, I found Louis C.K.’s comedy to be nothing short of genius.

Its genius, however, required irony, and C.K.’s actions removed irony from the table. While creepiness had always been a conscious part of his comedy, without irony, all that was left was a creep. I didn’t want to give any more of my money to a creep.

Of course, my lack of support hasn’t stopped him. He’s a comedian. He tells jokes. And he tells them well enough for people to pay him for the privilege to hear them.

(I question the character of those who still choose to give him their money, but I questioned my own character for watching the NFL, and look how much that changed the world.)

He tells them so well, in fact, that I once crafted an etymological argument explaining why he should be invited back onto the world’s stage: because maybe only he had the genius to help us…(alas)

Louis C.K. tells jokes. People pay to hear them. All the power to him.

But I’m choosing not to listen. That’s not called canceling. That’s called “Moving on.”

Categories
life politics

On The Night They Bombed Ukraine

Is it basically one gang against another gang? 

And you and me, victims and witnesses.

Speaking as a generally-stay-within-100-miles-of-my-home American citizen whose relationship to “the world” is mediated by individuals and corporations publishing their interpretations of the world onto the Internet (most often and most insidiously in the form of a capitalistically-motivated algorithm), I have to believe that the felt reality of capitalist-driven, consumer- and public-debt financed colonialism feels an awful lot like an American citizen in a security-forces uniform staring down at you from behind the barrel of a gun.

What does it feel like to be in Ukraine tonight? Fear. Anger. Rage. Pride. Intolerable grief. 

Witnesses and victims. 

Except they’re staring up the barrel of a Russian-financed gun, into the eyes of a Russian-financed citizen standing in a Russian-financed security-forces uniform. A rose by any other name would still smell as crony capitalist. 

And for what? Money and turf; and the rare metals and gasses hidden just beneath that turf.

Say what you want about the former President (and I have), but he wasn’t always wrong. Elite citizens of the United States and their family members have interests in the land we call Ukraine. Some of them belong to Biden’s gang. Some of them belong to Putin’s gang. 

None of the gang members are treasonous; nor are they patriotic. The elite citizens of the United States have long-since abandoned the ideology of nationalism, laying their heads instead on the satin-sheets of crony capitalism. 

It’s not “Down with Russia” or “Let’s Go Joe or Brandon”. It’s witnesses and victims feeling powerless on the Internet while two gangs that neither of us belong to destroy yet another generation of Homo sapiens.

Thoughts and prayers.

Categories
politics

A Brief Statement Regarding Kyle Rittenhouse

On Friday, November 19, 2021, just after 1:00 pm EST, a citizen jury serving at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acquitted a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.

The verdict, as with virtually every public decision nowadays, divided the populace of the United States. A large percentage of citizens celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict for strengthening an individual’s right to defend themselves. Another bemoaned the verdict as yet another data point in the criminal court system’s historical defense of white power.

While members of the ruling classes debated the verdict from their laptops and television studios in the country’s major metropolitan areas, a doctor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Kyle Pfefferle, contacted an LSU student he met at the university’s library, a man named Kyle Sellers. Dr. Pfefferle knew Sellers was a double major in computer science and computer engineering set to graduate in December. Dr. Pfefferle challenged Sellers to build a data-mining tool to scrub the Internet for any bit of contact information belonging to each of the Kyles in the United States.

By Saturday evening, Sellers accomplished the task, and at 6:39 pm CST, Pfefferle and Sellers possessed a Google Sheet with the phone numbers and email addresses of over 160,00 individuals in the United States whose names began with Kyle. Based on Social Security data from the past 100 years, experts estimate that over 460,000 Kyles currently reside in the country.

I received my first text from Dr. Pfefferle on Sunday, November 21, 2021, at 8:03 pm EST. It read:

My name’s Doctor Kyle Pfefferle, and I invite you to join a Zoom call tonight to discuss with 163,631 other Kyle’s [sic] what our response will be to the Rittenhouse verdict.

Astounded, I confirmed my interest and attendance.

At 11:10 pm EST, I received an invitation to join the Zoom call, but due to the technical limitations of the service, when I logged on, I found only 99 other Kyles in attendance. Dr. Pfefferle was not one of them. Instead, a middle-aged man named Kyle Pretsch greeted me. Pretsch was a Vice President of IT Development for a company in Phoenix, Arizona, and he introduced himself as the group’s facilitator.

Pretsch announced that out of all the Kyles invited to the emergency conference, 87,917 signaled their willingness to attend. Dr. Pfefferle asked the first respondents to facilitate meetings of 100 Kyles each. Our task was to determine how we felt as a group about the Rittenhouse verdict and to elect a representative who would attend a second gathering to speak on our behalf later in the night.

The meeting lasted 75 minutes. The conversation covered everything from the validity of The New York Times’ 1619 Project to the wisdom of constructing a physical wall along the nation’s southern border. Our facilitator successfully navigated the noisy voices of the rest of us, and as we approached the end of the meeting, he called a vote on whether we, as a group, approved of the Rittenhouse verdict.

With a majority opinion decided, we spent the last five minutes constructing an acceptable statement of our feelings. At the end of the meeting, the group nominated three potential representatives to attend the second meeting. I was humbled when a plurality of these strangers elected me to speak for them. I don’t know why they did so, but I vowed to take the responsibility seriously.

On Monday, November 22, 2021, at 1:30 am EST, I attended another Zoom call with 999 other individuals named Kyle. Each of us represented roughly one hundred other Kyle. I learned that not every Kyle who had signaled their willingness to attend the first meeting had done so, but most had. A few individuals in this second meeting represented groups with odd numbers, but most of us represented 100, and none of us knew who represented the smaller groups.

Dr. Pfefferle facilitated the conversation, but he did not get a vote in the meeting and did not express his opinion. Instead, in his role as facilitator, he wielded the mute button. From my perspective, Dr. Pfefferle restricted his use of the mute button to enforce unspoken rules of time and decorum, but I suspect some of those he muted may have felt slighted.

When Dr. Pfefferle turned the microphone over to me, I spoke on behalf of my constituents to express their opinions and concerns. Out of a sense of fairness to the minority opinion-holders in our group, I also expressed their significant positions. I believe I represented our group fairly.

At the end of the call, Dr. Pfefferle called for nominees to speak on behalf of America’s Kyles. Over 139 names were called in the first round. The voting lasted for 29 rounds, but in the end, the group reached a majority conclusion.

At 6:11 am EST on Monday, November 22, 2021, I was rewarded (or perhaps cursed) to be elected to submit that conclusion for public review.

And so, on behalf of the majority of Kyles of the United States of America whose contact information could be scrubbed from the Internet, I now offer this brief statement:

Fuck Kyle Rittenhouse.

Categories
politics

Post-Trump Politics

President Trump has been out of office for almost 160 days. During that time, I mostly paid attention to the actions of Congress. I focused on the COVID relief bills, the voting rights bills (federal and state), climate-related actions, and Supreme Court decisions. I also followed the lethal attacks on a woman’s right to control her body and an LGBTQ+ person’s right to define the terms of their existence. 

I paid too little attention to the COVID situation in South America, Africa, Europe, or Asia (excluding the death tolls in India and Brazil and a vague awareness of the Delta variant), and I paid zero attention to the COVID situation in Australia or the Pacific Islands.

Post-Trump, I’ve reduced my news intake considerably. I have, in terms of Voltaire, taken to cultivating my garden. I try to avoid “the three great evils [of] l’ennui, le vice, et le besoin” (though all things in moderation, I suppose) while also practicing gratitude and kindness (and too often failing at both).

In Candide, Voltaire’s “honest Turk” presumes “that they who meddle with the administration of public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it.” The more I ignore the nastiness of the narcissists in Washington D.C., the more I tend to agree with Voltaire.

Of course, it’s easy for me to ignore the goings-on in our nation’s capital. I’m a white, cisgender, heterosexual male with a full-time job, clear citizenship status, and a fixed-rate mortgage in a rural village in Vermont. 

I don’t have to worry about ending my unwanted pregnancy. My skin color probably won’t cause my untimely death at the hands of police officers, biased medical professionals, violent racists, or self-appointed vigilantes. I can leave my house without fear of unwarranted deportation. I can use a public restroom without risking my physical safety. I don’t have a greedy landlord who can jack up my rent. I live far from rising sea levels and in a region that (so far) has been lucky enough to avoid massive droughts, storms, and wildfires.

My ability to ignore Washington D.C. is, simply put, evidence of my privilege.

But it is also evidence of my age. At forty-four years old, I don’t have the passion for politics I once had. I still get mad at the lies and the lying liars who tell them, and I still get inspired by faithful public servants. But the reduction of our representative democracy to an idiotic, self-obsessed punditocracy has destroyed my ability to pay attention.

Add the Republican party’s decades-long nosedive into cynicism, anti-democratic fascism, and blatant white-supremacy to the Democratic party’s inability to pass crucial legislation like a $15 minimum wage or the For the People Act, and you’ll sympathize with my withdrawal from daily politics.

Thankfully, with President Biden in the White House and the Democratic Party (at least temporarily) in control of Congress, I don’t have to wake up terrified to read the headlines each morning. I don’t expect a pre-emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, a national ban on Muslim travelers, or a federal boondoggle on behalf of fossil fuel companies. 

In our Post-Trump moment, instead of sparking my anxiety disorder with a daily deep-dive into all the ways our government is ruining the present and future, I choose to sit on my front porch, crack open a locally brewed beer, pick at my ukulele, and escape into a book of fiction. 

And for that, I am thankful.